Elzbieta Matynia, associate professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research, and director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, offers a fresh take on regime change in her recently published book, Performative Democracy.

Drawing upon both personal experience in her native Poland and concepts of J.L. Austin, Hannah Arendt, and Mikhail Bakhtin, she introduces a whole new way of both understanding and enacting nonviolent democratic change. By tracing the gradual emergence of a democratic public sphere within a totalitarian regime (starting with student theater), she reminds us that our geopolitical world did not suddenly change overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and identifies some of the pre-conditions for the kinds of negotiation that without bloodshed brought down Communism in 1989 and apartheid in 1993. But in two chapters on the role of women she also underscores the ongoing challenge of sustaining authentic democratic process.

In translation, this richly empirical, historical, and theoretical work has won recently wide acclaim in Poland. The original is already out in hard cover from Paradigm Publishers , as part of its Yale Cultural Sociology Series, and the soft-cover edition will be out in August, just in time for the 20th anniversary of the peaceful dismantling of communism in East and Central Europe.